This is the latest post in a
series about Bertrand
Russell's essay
Why I am not a Christian, in which I run through his various
arguments and show that for the most part (there are a few exceptions)
they either don't apply to
classical theism, or are just completely invalid in the first place.
But another striking thing about Russell's work are the arguments he
omitted. In the last post, I gave a brief overview of some of these; in
this post I discuss in detail what I consider the most important, the
argument from miracles.

The purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God are useful,
in that they provide us with most of the necessary intellectual framework
in which to understand revelation. But they cannot take us all the way.
Real-life religions are founded on revealed truth; that is particular
messages from God that provide information about either God's nature,
ourselves, or the relationship linking God with material living creatures
such as ourselves. These revelations are what really founds each religion.
Later on theologians combine what those revelations revealed with the
philosophy that best fits them to create the various systems of doctrine
and dogma which define each religion.

Revelation is seen by the devout as more secure than philosophy. The
reason is straight-forward: philosophy is based on reason, the movement
from premise to conclusion. The problem is: how do we know which premises
are correct? Reason alone cannot guide us. Of course, we have the condition that
the philosophy needs to be consistent with empirical science, which
narrows the field of possible premises down, but (it is claimed) not
enough to decide the big metaphysical questions. I would not wholly agree
with this statement, since modern quantum physics is far more limiting
than many philosophers and theologians realise, but it is still partially correct.
Revelation, on the other hand, comes direct from the source. There is
always some ambiguity in interpretation (but then there is also ambiguity
and imprecision in experimental data), but this can be quantified and
stated within sometimes quite narrow bounds.

But the problem is that how do we know that a revelation is truly from God,
and not, for example, merely an
epileptic hallucination
,
or some other such thing? The answer is that
it needs to be associated with some dramatic sign that could not
be explained by natural means. Composing a book, any book, no matter how
great is not enough (because if we can speak some words then we can also
think them for the first time). A dramatic healing, the dead coming
back to life, suspension of gravity: we need something of that magnitude.
Then, if the witness
statements are credible and the context of the life associated with the
event consistent with them and what we expect from a man or woman of
God, we can believe the testimony that accompanies them. Events such as
these, which authenticate and expand upon a
revelatory testimony, are what we mean by miracles.

The analysis of whether any particular miracle occurs is not a matter of
philosophy. That means looking at the sources, and coming to the best
decision possible. That miracles
have occurred
, and continue to occur, is I think, undeniable given the
overwhelming weight of evidence. But some philosophies claim that the
miraculous is impossible, or at least so unlikely that we need not
consider the possibility in practice. This, I think, is enough to show
that those philosophies are untenable. Since atheistic philosophies all
deny the possibility of miracles, the occurrence of miracles is thus a
strong argument against atheism.

But I am getting ahead of myself. What do we mean by a miracle, and how
do we know that something is miraculous? A common definition is that a
miracle is a breaking of the laws of physics by some supernatural power.
This was, for example, the definition used by Hume in his attack on the
possibility of the miraculous, and it has been taken up by most atheists
since then. I do not, however, believe that it is a particularly useful
definition.

The crux comes in what do we mean by the "laws of physics". There are two
definitions which I want to discuss here, which tend to be used by the
majority of the atheist apologists who adopt this definition. The first is
that they are
empirically derived laws; the second some possibly mechanistic rule that
is independent of God and obeyed by all matter.

The empirical rule was perhaps the first of these that came onto the
historical scene. The simplest form of rule can be thought of as follows.
Some experimental physicist measures something. He varies one parameter
of a closed physical system, keeping everything else constant as well
as he can, measures the response of some other observable, and plots on
a graph the original variation against the response. For example, he might
enclose a gas in a container, and measure the pressure against the
temperature. Then, when he has enough measurements and data points, he
will try to fit a mathematical function to the data. If he finds a simple
relationship, then he will declare this a law of physics, and move onto
the next experiment. Examples of this sort of law are the original statements
of Gilbert's studies
of magnetism, Boyle's studies of gases, Kepler's laws of planetary motion,
Snell's law of refraction, and so on. It was this understanding of the
laws of physics as a statement of empirical correlation that inspired
Hume's philosophy, and it is what he meant when he formulated his
definition of the miraculous.

The second understanding of the laws of physics started from mathematical
premises, and used them to predict how matter behaved. This had its roots
in the medieval mathematicians, but didn't really reach maturity until
Galileo. It is what most people today understand by the laws of physics.
Examples include Newton's laws of motion and gravity, Fermat's least time
principle, or the Euler-Lagrange principle of least action. Generally
these laws are used to calculate the empirically derived "laws", and if
they do so well then they are vindicated and accepted. For example,
Kepler's laws of motion are deduced from Newton's laws; Boyle's laws of
Gases from the laws of Maxwell-Boltzmann statistical mechanics; Snell's
law of refraction from Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. And generally
that is how classical physics proceeded, with experimentally derived "laws"
deduced from and superseded by laws derived from more fundamental,
metaphysical (albeit expressed mathematically) premises (for example, we could
use the premise that Newton's laws are obeyed by all matter). And,
I would say, it is this understanding of law which influences most of
those who define a miracle as a breaking of the laws of physics today.

Now of these two approaches, the mathematical is to be preferred, since it
explains the empirical law and can also be used to predict under what
circumstances it will be valid and what circumstances it will break down.
But neither will do as part of the definition of the miraculous. The
reason is straight-forward: both of these understandings of the laws of
physics had their origin in the late medieval period, and came to
prominence during the Renaissance or later. Before then, people had a very
different understanding of physics, one which did not depend on such
concepts of laws. And yet these people also spoke of the miraculous.
The classical, Biblical, early Christian and early Islamic writers must
have had a different definition of what a miracle entailed. If we want to
be consistent with these writers (always a good idea when conversing with
them), then we should adopt a definition which might be expressed in a
more modern language but nonetheless consistent with their own.

To these writers, a miracle was something that induced wonder, or a sign
from God that displayed something about his character or power. One
can't just separate the universe into that subject to physics which is
independent of God and the miraculous which depends on God because to this
mindset everything is caused by God, both the non-miraculous and the
miraculous. It is why I define physics as the description of how God
would sustain the universe were He wholly indifferent to it. There is no
law independent of God, there is just God and His deeds.

So it is agreed that a miracle is something out of the ordinary; it is
agreed that the universe is usually regular and a miracle is a break in
that irregularity. But it is not an intervention by God because everything
is God's work; that definition would not distinguish between the miraculous
and non-miraculous. Instead we should regard it as a sign. But a sign of what?
If nothing else, that God (or some other supernatural being with similar
power) takes an interest in human affairs. Each miracle might well, and
usually would, mean more than this; it cannot mean less than this.
A miracle, in short, is an
event that provides evidence that God (or whatever we want to call the
foundation behind physics) is not wholly disinterested in human affairs.

We can construct physical theories on the basis of a small number of
premises and assumptions. We can take some assumptions, and calculate what
physics would resemble; with different assumptions we get a different
picture. By comparing these assumptions against reality, we can narrow
down to the correct picture. If we add to these premises the assumption
that God is indifferent to mankind, then we obtain a theory of physics.
If some observations deviate from that theory, then one of the premises
behind the theory must be wrong, and we can in principle eliminate the
alternatives and conclude that those deviations provide evidence that God
is not indifferent to our species. These events thus provide evidence,
sometimes strong evidence, for the existence and nature of God.

Quantum physics is indeterminate (which ultimately is a consequence of
God's free will), but that does not mean that anything can happen.
There are various conservation laws, the conservation of momentum,
electric charge, and so on that must be obeyed by matter (if God is
indifferent to mankind); equally there is the second law of thermodynamics
which complex systems are also bound to. Each of these constraints
ultimately arise from the principle of locality -- that interactions
between particles (i.e. the creation and annihilation of material
particles from other particles) occur at the same point in space-time.
What happens in one place doesn't affect the probabilities of each
possible outcome elsewhere. If God were indifferent to nature, that
would be what we expect: being outside time and space, God relates to
each point in the universe in the same way, and since he doesn't care about
events at point A, that would not affect what he does at point
B, or point C. Thus, if they are otherwise equal, the
probabilities of a particular decay occurring at B or C
would be the same, regardless of what is happening elsewhere in the
universe.

But suppose that God were not indifferent to mankind; we would expect to
see some over-reaching goal or purpose to the universe. Because God cares
about the fate of a man at point A, he will act at B at
an earlier time to make that goal realised. This breaks the principle of
locality, and therefore momentum need not be conserved or the second law
need not be satisfied if God so wills it. Thus examples where these
principles do seem to be violated, such as when water turns into wine,
or a man comes back from the dead, are evidence for God's caring about
mankind and arranging events at a microscopic level to bring about those
goals. It seems idiotic to me for someone to admit the possibility for
God's existence, and yet deny that He can perform the miraculous.

But does the regularity of nature show that miracles are immensely
improbable? Isn't a law of nature induced from numerous experiments, so
to say that the law is violated to deny that conclusion? No. The law of
nature found by induction from experiment is just one model to explain
that data. There could be many other models which also explain that data.
So let us say we have some data D, which everyone agrees on.
There are two models consistent with this data, X which forbids
miracles in any
circumstances and model Y which permits them in certain
circumstances. We then have the evidence E for an event which is
claimed to be miraculous. Both models predict the experimental data D which was
used in the initial analysis. How then can one use the experiments to judge
between the
models? That some experiments seem to apply a certain regularity in
a particular circumstance is all well and good; but to link them to
the particular circumstance of E depends on the model we use to
perform the extrapolation. If we attempt to calculate the probability that
the miracle actually occurred, this will be conditional on the both the
evidence E, and our choice of model. Those who demand
atheism will choose model X and conclude that the probability
of the miracle occurring conditional upon the evidence and the model
is vanishingly small no matter how good the evidence E.
Agnostics would give models X and Y equal weight, and
if the evidence is good enough conclude that it is quite probable that the
miracle occurred (and consequently that model Y is to be preferred
as it better explains the totality of the evidence). Both of these
conclusions are correct: probability is,
after all, always conditional and objectively computed from its premises.

We were asking the wrong question. The issue is not whether
or not the miracle occurred, but which model is most consistent with all
the data, both D and E. X which is consistent
with atheism, is strongly contradicted by the evidence E.
Y, which implies some form of theism, is consistent with all the
data available. The obvious conclusion is that model Y and thus
theism should be preferred.

The problem with arguments of this sort is that they get probability
completely wrong, and fail to realise that the probability one computes
for an event to have occurred depends on one's model and metaphysical assumptions, and there are
different choices of model consistent with the original data. The only way
in which one can say that the probability of the miracle is tiny is to
demand that we use a model that denies the miraculous, or assert that
there is no model that allows the miraculous consistent with our initial
data, before examining the evidence. This approach is not only circular,
but a wholly
incorrect methodology. We should let the evidence judge our atheism (or
theism, or whatever), not let our atheism colour how we view the evidence.

But if an event claimed to be a miracle occurs, doesn't that just prove
that we got our understanding of physics wrong? There is no need to
invoke God to explain the event. We just need a better physics. Isn't this
so?

No. It might have been a reasonable argument in the pre-Newtonian days
when physics was just about connecting empirical data, or even the period
between Newton and Einstein. But not know, because the most fundamental
physical theory is now directly computed from various philosophical
premises (which enter the theory as various symmetry rules, the
requirement of locality and cluster decomposition, and so on). We are thus
able to test these premises directly. One such premise is that the
power that underlies physics (whether it is God as traditionally conceived
or something else) is indifferent to the fate of mankind. But whether
or not that is true is the question we want to answer in the debate
between theism and atheism. Miracles thus provide a direct channel to
knowledge of God. Whether we call these events as part of physics or not
is irrelevant to their role in providing evidence for God's nature. The
question assumes that physics acts independently of God; theism is built
on the idea that physics is a description of God's acts. This is the real
question, and whether we define physics so that it includes miraculous
acts or excludes them (I define it to exclude them) is an irrelevance.

But isn't belief in miracles just a relic of a superstitious age? Hasn't
science disproved them?

No. Firstly, people in the past might not have known about the second
law of thermodynamics, but they didn't need to to know that dead people
don't usually come back to life. The amount of science needed to recognise
a miracle can be gathered by just basic observation of the world. Secondly,
miracle claims didn't only occur in the past or less educated communities,
but are witnessed today and by experts. While not every claim is a
genuine miracle, that there are some mistakes and frauds does not mean
that they are all mistakes and frauds. Thirdly, science proves nothing
of the sort. Physical theory is a description of how the universe would be
sustained if God were indifferent to its fate. But, if so, then we cannot
use it to claim that the source underlying Physics is indifferent to
us. It is an assumption put into the framework used to develop that
formulation of physical law;
to subsequently argue against miracles because they violate that physical
theory would be begging the question. The law simply was only designed
to be applied in certain circumstances. To use it outside those circumstances
is to draw more from it than it allows. The assumption of indifference is what is tested
by claims of miracles.

For example, one can claim that evolution by
natural selection is undirected (except in the sense that populations
have a tendency to adapt forms which are most likely to pass on their
genetics). But that is not a conclusion read from the theory, but an
assumption put into it. Evolution is a combination of unpredictable
mutations and natural selection. The mutations are only unpredictable to
us because they are, for the theist, the direct result of God's free will.
There is therefore nothing inconsistent in saying that mutation is both
unpredictable (to us) and guided by God. The theory describes how life
forms evolve under if certain circumstances are correct and if certain
assumptions hold. To suggest that those circumstances and assumptions are
universal is an assumption added to the theory by atheists. It does not
follow from the experiment (since no experiment that fits the assumption
of universality can be used to refute the denial of universality: it is
consistent with both the assumption that the law is universal and that it
isn't); and it is logically impossible to deduce the universal
applicability of some particular physical theory from the theory itself.

But isn't it demeaning for God to have to keep intervening? Wouldn't it
be greater if He just designed the universe to not need miraculous
intervention?

Why would it be? This objection again assumes a set of physical laws
independent of God; it states that wouldn't God have been greater if He
could have designed those laws so that he didn't need to keep intervening.
But, for the theist, this is based on an incorrect understanding of God's
sustaining of the universe; it puts an intermediary between God and the
movement of matter. To God, there is no difference between the usual
evolution of matter and the special case. Instead, miracles showcase God's
power and love for humanity; they show God to be greater than He would be
if there were just the usual movement of matter.

But doesn't that the universe mostly seem as though God were indifferent
to us show that God is wholly indifferent to us, and thus disprove the
possibility of miracles?

Not for all forms of theism. Much of the universe evolves consistent with
the assumption that God is indifferent to it because God genuinely
indifferent to it. But what about this small pinprick in the galaxy we
live on? Here the claim is that God largely leaves things to get on as
though He did not care, not because He does not care, but because we
demanded and continue to demand independence. God's intervention comes at
a price: that we become good people. For almost all of us, that is too
much; it means giving up all the pleasurable wrongdoing we are so addicted
to. God seems to be indifferent because we demand that He keeps out of our
lives, and buy and large God respects our freedom. Why then are there any
miracles at all? Because, firstly, even though we reject God's help, we
still need it, and He has to give us enough information to still
understand that and His plan to rescue us. Secondly, there are a few not
in rebellion, who desire a genuine goodness and are willing to rely on
and trust God to provide it.

The question is what is the optimal balance between the regularity of
nature and the miraculous. If men frequently came back from the dead, then
the resurrection of Lazarus would lose its significance. If the principle
that dead men stayed dead extended even to Lazarus, then we would also not
be able to learn the lessons from that event. It is difficult for us to
say that the frequency of miracles is as we would expect if Christian
doctrine is correct; it is even harder for us to say that it isn't.

But doesn't quantum mechanics allow anything to happen? So aren't miraculous
occurrences possible in an atheistic world-view, just incredibly unlikely.
Yet the unlikely will happen on occasion if there are enough examples. So
aren't miracles just the working of chance?

Firstly, there comes a point when the odds are so stacked against something
(not just the occurrence of the miracle, but the coincidence of it coinciding
with the prayer) that the probability (conditional on the assumption of atheism)
of it happening is so close to zero that we may as well forget about the
difference and seek alternative explanations. But secondly,
and more importantly, quantum mechanics is not the most fundamental physical
theory; quantum field theory is the fundamental theory, and transitions
between states in field theory are bound by various conservation laws. It
is not the case in quantum physics that anything can happen. Some things,
even most things, are forbidden. If one of those principles are violated,
then we know that quantum physics is only a partial, but not complete,
description of the universe. Precisely as the theist has always claimed,
and the atheist and deist always denied.

If one believes in an omnipotent God who actively sustains all aspects of
the universe, then to deny the possibility of the miraculous is as insane
as to deny the usual regularity of nature (and a belief in miracles is
just as dependent on that usual regularity as a disbelief in them). The
usual arguments against the miraculous, from Hume's to Spinoza's to those
of the present day are built on premises drawn from an atheistic or
deistic world-view. To refuse to consider the argument from miracles in an
apologetic against theism believing those arguments to have been
refuted therefore requires that we assume theism is false before looking
at the evidence: a classic case of begging the question.

Some html formatting is supported,such as <b> ... <b> for bold text , < em>... < /em> for italics, and <blockquote> ... </blockquote> for a quotation
All fields are optional
Comments are generally unmoderated, and only represent the views of the person who posted them.
I reserve the right to delete or edit spam messages, obsene language,or personal attacks. However, that I do not delete such a message does not mean that
I approve of the content. It just means that I am a lazy little bugger who can't be bothered to police his own blog.